The Final Planet

by Andrew M. Greeley

  There was softness and surrender in her now. “Whatever it is, I accept it.” His hands were still moving over her; she had relaxed under their touch.

  “Well, it’s this. When this night is over, I’m considering you my mate for the rest of my life. If you ever try to get out of it, idjit, I’ll spank you within an inch of your life, do you hear?” He patted her glorious rear end in feigned warning and his voice was soft and husky.

  She began to cry. “Forever, Geemie. And even after that.”

  Seamus covered her face with kisses, his passion finally wild. Easy, me boy, this one will break if you’re not careful. He reined in his ardor and began to slowly and lovingly prepare her for their union.

  15

  The great ugly lake glared at Seamus O’Neill; its twisting vegetation seemed to grasp eagerly for his soul. The Black Mood was upon him, the worst of all the Taran emotional afflictions. “Self-pity and infidelity,” the Captain Abbess would snap when informed that one of her subjects “has taken the Black Mood, Y’r Reverence.”

  But the Black Mood was not cured by the Cardinal’s wrath nor by the ministrations of the medical team, nor by the prayers of the monks. It eventually went away, however. If the Lady Deirdre were to be believed, it went away when the victim decided to act “like an adult and a sworn pilgrim again.”

  There was no record of a Black Mood being fatal. Nor indeed of it ever being permanent. But that datum brought no surcease to those who were in the grip of the Black Mood. They were convinced that their case would be the exception that proved the rule.

  Seamus had been the victim of it only once in his life before. He couldn’t even remember the reason, though he always thought that some of his best poetry had been written when the Mood was upon him.

  Now he wasn’t writing poetry or singing songs. He had repaired his harp, without the slightest hesitation. He had used it to sing love songs to his bride, love songs he had not yet written down and now claimed to himself that he had forgotten.

  The Mood had hung on for days. In some twisted way he was beginning to like it. He kicked a rock into the dark waters of the Great Lake. Damn it and damn Zylong; damn Iona and, above all, damn Marjetta.

  Damn him, too. The mess was his fault. Had his brain become so numbed by sex that he couldn’t think anymore? Now he had them lost on this vast water trap. Since coming down from the mountain he had made nothing but mistakes. He was responsible for Marjetta’s deterioration. The Iona had written him off completely: if it hadn’t left orbit before, it was sure to now, leaving him to rot in this moldy jungle by himself for the rest of his natural life, which wouldn’t be very long.

  Maybe the reason he had been so harsh with Margie was that he was taking some of his self-hatred out on her—though heaven knows the woman would have driven a monk to drink. He had shouted at her that if she felt that way she ought to go out into the jungle and die. Without a word she had picked up and was gone, never turning back. “Don’t be in any hurry to come crawling back,” he had shouted after her.

  She didn’t come crawling back, either, as he assumed she would. God in heaven, the woman would try the patience of a saint.

  He hadn’t meant it. Did she have sense enough to know that he merely had been venting his anger? Well, he’d tell her a thing or two when she finally returned.

  “The back of me hand to you, woman,” he’d shout, though that wouldn’t mean anything either. A proper Taran wife ought to know when her man was only talking.

  She’s not a Taran, you dummy.

  Shut up. When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.

  She had left in early morning; now it was almost night. Appalled by the enormity of what he had said and done, he had plunged recklessly through the jungle calling her name. Her behavior was unpredictable. He should have held his temper and fought the thing out some other way. The Zylongi had this crazy “deciding-to-die” thing in which you turn off your vital processes. In the state the poor girl was in, she might have done just that.

  This is our honeymoon, he told himself. We shouldn’t be fighting this soon.

  You never should have done it, you idjit. You got carried away by your passions. The Abbess always warned you about that. God knows, she had experience enough of it herself when she was younger. Why weren’t you after listening to her?

  The woman is nothing more than a child, not much older than Retha. Would you practically rape that little tyke?

  And she’s never been in love before. And you’re an experienced man of the galaxy and a great traveler besides. You were a badly matched couple to begin with. If you’d had any sense at all, you would have never laid a hand on her.

  He kicked another rock. It bounced against a floating log and shot back at him. Even the lake was fighting him.

  Well, now, it really wasn’t rape. She wanted it as much as you did.

  You should have said no.

  Easy enough for you to talk.

  Their first coupling had not been a complete success, to put the matter mildly. They were tired, nervous, frightened, unskilled—himself almost as bad as she.

  No, to tell the truth, maybe worse.

  It had not been all that bad, either. They both laughed at their own awkwardness and turned what might have been a disaster into a happy comedy. They played with each other’s bodies and laughed themselves to sleep.

  They improved as lovers with practice. The woman was a quick study, God knows. They didn’t provide much in the way of sex education on Zylong, even less than the Tarans received, which wasn’t much at all. But Margie was naturally good at everything, even lovemaking.

  Especially lovemaking, come to think of it.

  “Practice makes perfect,” he said to her the first morning, as he munched on some tasty jungle fruit that she assured him was safe, even a delicacy.

  “Good. Let’s practice more. I want to be perfect.” She literally jumped on him.

  Well, they had lots of practice during those idyllic days. The woman was insatiable. Not that he minded the fun and games at all. At all. His instinctive decision that she was the proper woman had been correct. Whatever else happened between them in the decades together that he cheerfully anticipated, she would never be dull in bed. Fight they might, but as Carmody had candidly told him, there are some kinds of women you can’t stay away from. His Margie was one of those.

  And she had only begun to learn the arts of love. What would she be like when she was “perfect,” as she wanted to be?

  “Practically perfect will be enough for me,” he had chuckled, removing his lips temporarily from a compliant breast.

  “You deserve perfection, my beloved,” she replied, tears of adoration in her eyes.

  Adoration one moment, fury the next. Worse than the worst of the Tarans. And that was bad.

  Of course, they had begun their life together in difficult circumstances. A walk through the jungles of Zylong was not exactly a leisurely wedding trip.

  Maybe, he told himself, leaning a little bit against his Black Mood, we would have done all right if we weren’t caught out here.

  What’s the point in thinking that? We are caught out here. Then again, we can’t stay in the jungle for the rest of our lives.

  After they left the pool to continue the long walk back toward the City, the jungle was not actively hostile. It looked like pictures he had seen of Precambrian forests of Earth. The reptilelike creatures who dwelt in it were small and fled quickly at their approach. There was an abundance of fruit and plenty of water. Though they’d lost most of their equipment when the raft he’d built overturned in the tributary he had foolishly insisted on fording at nightfall, staying alive was not difficult.

  And the crazy woman had to dive into the River to save my harp.

  As though being a bard made any difference anymore, the idjit.

  The jungle took its toll nevertheless. Underbrush, swamp, rain, mist, damp, heat—a dark, dismal heat that was almost palpable under the sunscreen of giant trees—d
rained their strength. With only one spear blade (the precious tranquillity pills hidden in its handle) and a carbine barrel, they fought for every inch of movement through the underbrush. A humid, thick perfume hung in the jungle air like overpowering incense.

  They were both sick. The inoculations Samaritha had given him back at the Body Institute protected him from the worst of the jungle diseases, but they were both listless, enervated, depressed.

  He was too besotted with fulfilled passion to recognize the beginning of the trouble with Marjetta. They had stayed at their “mating pool” four days, recovering from the mountains and exploring the delights of each other’s body. Practicing, as she called it. The days at the pool became unbearably delicious. His tenderness began to unlock her passions. Not only was her curiosity and her hunger a match for his, she was the more passionate.

  It was his tenderness that ruined everything. Mating for the Zylongi was not something joyous; it couldn’t be in a culture that so strongly repressed individuality. If he had been any kind of an anthropologist, he would have realized that sex for the Zylongi was a brief, brutal act. If people like Sammy and Ernie had discovered there was something else to love, many more saw mating as a brief respite from the loneliness and isolation that a communitarian culture fostered in sensitive people. Tenderness and concern for the other were virtually unknown.

  So if a young woman goes through a series of disasters that wipes out all of her contacts with her own culture, and then discovers an unsuspected and overwhelming animal passion within herself, the result will be personality disorientation, even if she loves it and even if she insists on “practice” at every possible opportunity.

  And there are plenty of opportunities, if there’s nothing else to do but nibble on delicious fruit and if your man is an oversexed and undersatisfied pig.

  His judgment. Not hers.

  What happened was that Margie encountered another culture and lost her own. How ironic that it was an ideal of the Taran culture—tenderness to one’s lover—that did her in. If O’Neill had quickly and forcefully ravaged her, it would have been what she expected; nothing much would have been lost. After his first bumbling and clumsy failures, he had to become reasonably skilled at tenderness, play the great lover, and mess up everything. He could hear Deirdre now: “It’s all your fault, you idjit. You never could control your libido, could you?”

  The fighting began as soon as they left the pool area. Within a day she disintegrated. She complained, disagreed, fought, argued, and nagged. He could hardly believe that it was his lovely Marjetta, the cheerful romping mate of a day or two ago. She knew what kind of complaint would irk him the most, what kind of barb would most quickly penetrate the chinks in his self-assurance. He should have fought it out at the beginning. He dodged, ducked, and avoided, typical Taran male reaction to conflict with a woman—and made matters worse. The more she saw she could get away with, the more she pushed him. When he lost his temper finally, it was a blowup of monumental proportions that tore their relationship apart.

  The second night out in the jungle she pushed him away with the icy comment, “I will not couple with a man I do not respect.” His mistake was in letting her get away with it. He was so hurt that it hadn’t occurred to him till too late that he was being tested by an emotionally overwrought child. He should have laughed at her, joshed her, caressed her, and won her back.

  No, she had to go into her funk and I into my Black Mood. The Lord made us and the divil matched us.

  Their struggle through the jungle was mostly silent, punctuated by an occasional outburst of recrimination and complaint from Marjetta.

  According to the map, the journey should have been less arduous after they reached the Great Lake. The River was too swift in its course toward the lake for them to consider a raft, but after the Great Waterfall it flowed toward the City in what appeared to be a broad band of navigable water all the way down to the Zylong Plain. Again he had misjudged.

  When they had hacked their way to its shores, the lake was more sinister and more depressing than the jungle. It was still and smooth, shrouded in thick mists, filled with vegetation and rubble.

  “We are going to cross that?” Margie had snarled.

  “We certainly are,” he had replied tartly—though he had decided not to try a crossing. But when she nagged him, he reacted by doing whatever she didn’t want to do. So, against his better judgment, he ordered her to start working on a raft. That was a major mistake.

  They worked for a solid day, hacking away at trees with a stone ax he had devised and fashioning a crude raft out of logs and vines. Then they spent most of a night trying to construct flat paddles from the soft woody substance of the fernlike trees.

  In the morning the mist was even thicker. He insisted on setting off, despite her vigorous complaints.

  To give her credit, she did what she was told despite her complaints.

  The lake was liquid hell. They repeatedly fouled the raft in vegetation, collided with logs, and swirled dizzily in sudden and unpredictable currents. The heat and humidity were intolerable, the perfume of the forest replaced by the foul stench of rotting seaweed.

  The lake creatures were not nearly so timid as the jungle ones. A huge head thrust itself out of the mists of the lake and snapped a paddle in two. It might just as well have been an arm or a leg.

  “See,” Margie crowed triumphantly, “I told you the lake was dangerous.”

  They gave up and drifted into shore—though it might have been an island. The Black Mood rose up out of the fetid waters and claimed him. The mists were so thick they couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. O’Neill was disoriented. He did not know where they were or how they could find their way to the massive waterfall that began the main course of the River. He wanted to explore in one direction, Marjetta wanted to go another. They had gone his way—and discovered nothing but an impassable swamp. They were lost somewhere on the shore of a great dismal lake in the heart of a jungle.

  She berated him for all his failures and mistakes. “You are a bad poet, a worse soldier, and the worst possible explorer. How many more mistakes can you make before you will kill us both? I would have been happier in Narth’s harem.”

  She couldn’t have meant it, of course. It was the last desperate cry of a frightened and disoriented child. He should have taken her into his arms and soothed and caressed her until she calmed down. Any man with an ounce of sense would have done just that.

  But Seamus O’Neill in the Black Mood, by his own admission, didn’t have even half an ounce of sense.

  “Shut up,” he bellowed. “Like all the people on this godforsaken planet, you’re a stupid fool, a coward, and a crybaby. You’re an intolerable bitch, too, and a lousy lover.”

  “How can one be a good lover with a clumsy rapist?”

  He couldn’t take it any longer, he told himself in later attempts at self-justification. He ordered her out into the jungle. God knows, he had provocation enough. How was he to know that, dumb, literal-minded Zylongi bitch that she was, she’d take him literally?

  It was the end of everything. The end of the mission, the end of Marjetta, and soon the end of Seamus O’Neill. “Poor fella,” they’d say back on the Iona. “It was a shame he had to die so young. Not a bad one, you know. A great poet, even if we never did give him enough credit or praise. And of course a first-class soldier. He just didn’t have what was needed in a tight situation. Made a fine soldier but not much as a spy and a lover. ’Twas a shame, ’twas indeed, but we didn’t have anyone else to send, worse luck.” They would all sigh, then sigh again.

  A poor spy and a worse lover, such would be the epitaph of Seamus Finnbar Diarmuid Brendan Tomas O’Neill.

  After a while they would forget him altogether.

  He buried his head in his hands. Now would be the appropriate time to sob for his lost life and his lost love. But his Mood was so black that he couldn’t work up the energy for tears, which kind of ruined the effect.


  “Geemie,” a tiny voice from a great distance. I’m imagining it.

  “Geemie, my love.” Ah no, it ‘tis real enough.

  He decided he didn’t want to look up.

  ’Tis yourself. He did look up. There was Marjetta, standing silently, several yards down the shore of the steaming lake, tears rolling down her cheeks. His heart did a flipflop. Lord, she was beautiful, even after a week in the jungle. Despite the Black Mood he felt a surge of desire.

  “So, you decided to come back, did you, woman? It took you long enough,” he muttered glumly.

  She had regained some of her self-possession. “May I sit here on this log?” A tiny still voice.

  “It’s a free planet.” He sunk his head lower in his hands, trying not to look at her. “You can sit where you damn please.” He wasn’t giving an inch.

  “May I talk with you?” A polite enough risk, modestly presented.

  “The good Lord Himself couldn’t stop that if you’d made up your mind.” He burrowed his head further into his hands. She was being reasonable, why couldn’t he respond?

  She threw herself at his feet and embraced his legs. “Dear master, forgive me. I am unworthy of you. I don’t deserve you. I’m a worthless … bitch. A fool. An idjit. I could never again be your proper woman. Let me at least be a humble slave to serve your slightest whim. Please, please, wondrous master, forgive me. I’ll never offend you again. I promise.”

  Well, now that’s a bit much. Seamus removed his hands from his face and considered the trembling shoulders and heaving rib cage. Ah, she can’t mean it, can she? It’s nothing but stupid Zylongi exaggeration.

  Seamus O’Neill, you’re the idjit. One thing these poor heathens don’t do is exaggerate. The poor wee tyke thinks she can make it back only as a slave. That won’t do at all, at all.

  He stood up, feeling a jab of pain in his back. Ah, his spine would never be the same again. He pulled the would-be slave unceremoniously to her feet.